Exclusive Joyride Figure at San Diego Comic-Con

Joyride has announced an exclusive ODST action figure that will be available at San Diego Comic-Con. This particular piece is inspired by a scene from the Halo Graphic Novel, only 1200 will be made and they will be sold only at the Comic-Con. Check out their site for more information on availability.

In case you need more reason to go to Comic-Con, a ton of Bungie artists and community team members will be there. I, however, will be holding down the fort here. And breaking Frankie's stuff.

Yesterday Bungie faced off against one of the more popular Se7enth Column groups, The Gunslingers. Vegas odds of Bungie fending off defeat for an entire month? Astronomical. And yet, there's more to this week's Humpday than meets the eye...

Halo 3 Making Of Documentary on XBL Marketplace

The Halo 3: Behind the Scenesdocumentary is now available in 720p with 5.1 surround sound on Xbox Live Marketplace. If you want to view it on your ultramegahuegbig screen TV and shake your neighbors' houses with your 7,000 watt surround sound system, fire up the Xbox 360 and find it in Marketplace.

To find it, simply go to Demos and Game Videos --> Newly Released Game Videos --> Halo 3 --> Halo 3: In the Beginning.

If you don't have an Xbox 360 and this documentary is news to you, check it out in the original story.

Halo2Forum.com Montage Contest 5

Halo2Forum.com announces its montage contest 5 along with the biggest prize given to the winners. Over $1500 given to the top winners of the December 2006 montage contest. More...

After the success of $1000 Montage contest 4, Halo2Forum.com who has brought over 300 montages and hosted over 500 Halo videos, announces its Montage Contest 5. With the prize of $1500, you can be sure to expect some tough competition. If you have what it takes to make a montage, you do not want to miss on this contest.

This is not an official Bungie contest and Bungie is in no way affiliated with Halo2forum. For support regarding this contest, please contact them, not Bungie.

Intel Summer Championship Results

The Intel Summer Championships wrapped up this weekend in Grapevine, Texas and the winners have been announced. In the Halo 2 category, MLG Str8 Rippin walked away with the top spot and a cool five grand, with MLG XiT Woundz and MoB BigChili.com rounding out the top three, respectively.

You can find the full results for all of the tournaments held at the Intel Summer Championships on the WSVG website.

If you want to know a ton of information about Halo 3, this is not the week for you, but if you're interested in the Halo Graphic Novel, boy did you ever pick the right update. Click through for some Bungie Day Celebratory art.

Happy Bungie Day!

Every year on July 7th - 7/7 - the world celebrates Bungie Day! Bungie suggests that you immediately abandon all responsibilities to celebrate Bungiedom. We also suggest a barbecue featuring burgers, macaroni salad and Tijuana Mamas. Don't forget to invite all of your closest friends, the webmaster and Ling Ling.

This week Bungie took on the Cayote Cavegirls in the aftermath of our record breaking two game non-losing streak. Could Bungie fend off the suck for a third consecutive week? The answer to that, plus hot chicks, to follow.

Community Wallpaper Contest

The good folks at Seventh Column Contests and I have put together an unofficial wallpaper contest. This contest is meant to bring the members of the Bungie.net community closer together in a friendly competition. Please read on for more information.

The wallpaper contest starts today, July 6th, and ends on Friday, July 21st. Each participant is allowed to submit two entries for a chance at first place. There will be two rounds, the second of which will consist of the top wallpapers from the first round. After the top three wallpapers are chosen, the winners will be given either $25, $15, or $10 towards the Bungie store, depending on which place they finish in.

You can check out the whole setup by clicking this link to the Unofficial Wallpaper Contest thread in The Septagon forum.

KP sits down over tea and crumpets with Interweb Talk Jockey Foo Mo Jive from the popular Podtacular podcast - a Halo-centric digital broadcast I can play on an iPod, a PC or a piano if you hum it for me.

H2 Guide and H3 Guide Cover Art Competition

Mjolnir Battle Tactics has collected and processed all the information that has passed through our forum and is finally ready to release it in the form of our Halo 2 Strategy Guide. Also for the upcoming release of Halo 3 we are having a competition for the cover art of our Halo 3 Guide. The prize is $100. For more information on the guide and the H3 cover art competition read on.

Halo 2 GuideIn our guide we have a compilation of all the ideas of MBT and many other websites to be a sort of final installment to Halo 2 strategy. Here is a list of what the guide covers:

• "Analysis of Halo 2" which is a MBT post series.• Character descriptions, bios, and statistics.• Complete Campaign walkthrough with a Halo 2 game script.• Detailed Strategies and tactics for the core gametypes.• Overswarms "Not So Common Sense" Strategy Guide.• Secrets on little known tips and tricks to improve gameplay.• A breakdown of all the multiplayer maps with detailed strategies, weapons locations, respawns, and more.• Vasheeth's "Weapons and Tactical" Guide.• MBT's weapons tactical information including statistics and comparisions of weapons.• MBT's vehicle guide including detailed descriptions, statistics and strategy.

Note: This guide is based on strategy and tactics; as such no glitches, mods or other bannable topics have been discussed in this guide so if your looking for that kind of information go somewhere else.

Halo 3 Guide Cover Art CompetitionSince our Halo 2 guide is now complete we are looking towards the future and in preparation to begin our Halo 3 Guide Mjolnir Battle Tactics is having a competition to determine the cover art for our Halo 3 Guide. To enter the competition and have your art judged for the chance to win $100 you have to be a Mjolnir Battle Tactics member. A full set of rules and regulations have been posted on our forum.

H2Carnage.com

The latest trend among the online Halo 2 community has been online tournaments. One of the newst sites to follow this trend is www.h2carnage.com, hosting weekly online tournaments to break that summer boredom and build a strong community. Sign up at H2Carnage today for tourneys and a great community!

Run by myself(x BaiL x), Bradyok, and ImmeNeNt, H2Carnage is devoted to giving players highly organized and efficient online tournaments, played MLG style. Aside from tournaments, we offer forums for players to chat, meet new people, and satisfy their other grunty thirsts. If you would like to become a part of this growing community, visit H2Carnage today!

Help Custom Map Team

With the release of the Custom Map Team's revamp of Halo's (PC) campaign came with a bit more than expected. An article posted today stated that they are accepting donations from the community to help pay for overages on the server used to host the mod. Read on for more details.

Recently Custom Map Team posted an article on their website asking the community to help pay for surplus charges on their server payment. Within hours of release the server hosting the mod of Halo's (PC) campaign was being over run with download requests. Eventually the server had to be shut down and in the ruins of the download frenzy was a $400 dollar surplus charge for overages on the server.

CMT is asking the community to help pay the surplus charge so they can resume normal operation or expand their server package to meet the download demands. If you wish to donate to CMT's fund, please visit their website or HaloImpulse's site to contribute. Follow the paypal link on either site to donate. To ensure no confusion as to where your money is going, be sure to include either “For HI server" or “For CMT server” in your paypal donation. Also to alleviate some stress on CMT's server, the CMT campaign mod has been mirrored at Halomaps.org and is available for download here.

Halo 2 Headset to Benefit Katrina Victims

The Halo 2 headset is now being sold by Plantronics for $14.95 with one dollar going to benefit the victims of Hurricane Katrina. It'll work with either the Xbox or Xbox 360. If you need the communicator as well, they'll throw that in for another five bucks.

If you've been holding off on picking up this headset, now is definitely the time. It's a great headset, sound quality is crisp on both ends.

This may not be news to many of you, as it broke on Ars Technica a few days ago, where HBO picked it up.

Halo 3 Cover Art Contest Results

Over at HaloPlanet today, they've announced the results of their Halo 3 Cover Art Contest. Bungie is not affiliated with this contest and has nothing to do with the selection of the winners nor will we use their art for the cover. Congrats to the four winners!

No, that's not our Frankie. It is likely one of the many free-range Frank O'Connors, running naked and untamed about the internet.

Black Art of Halo Mods

The next release in Stephen Cawood's long line of Halo-related books is finally here. The Black Art of Halo Mods hit store shelves recently, and there isn't enough space on the interweb to describe the plethora of information available in this book.

The Black Art of Halo Mods by Stephen Cawood is packed with info on both the basic and advanced techniques of Halo CE customization. Included in the book is a crap load of tutorials and information on everything you can think of. Weapons, vehicles, bipeds, levels; you name it, it's got it.

The most important parts of the book are the extensive chapters on the undocumented features of the Halo Editing Kit. Some of you might be familiar with the Halo2CE Mod released a while back. Well they were generous enough to donate some of their top secret information on customization breakthroughs to the book. Another important part is the introduction to the upcoming all-in-one Halo tool Prometheus - http://www.halodev.org.

Although Halo Custom Edition is the main focus of the book, there is plenty of information on the history of Halo customization, which dates back over three years ago! I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot about whats inside this book, so hurry up and grab your copy today!

Stats Reloaded

There are a lot of cool sites and programs out there that make use of the RSS feed, one of them is the newly relaunched Stats Reloaded. You need to register for it to begin retrieving your stats, but once you do it's able to provide plenty of the more common stats, graphs and even a couple unique categories.

MLG Anaheim Wrapup

There's a slew of MLG Anaheim coverage over at MLGPro.com. Despite some really interesting 4v4 results in the beginning of the tournament, Final Boss remained unshaken atop the leaderboard. Karma was also able walk away with the 1v1 title yet again. Congrats to the winners, which is everyone, because we're all winners on the inside.

Sergeant Playwright

David Scully, voice of Sgt. Johnson and noted playwright, has authored a play to be read on August 4th and 5th here in Seattle. Ghetto Mansion will be read by The Hansberry Project at the ACT theatre. Read on for more info and a short description.

Upcoming Video Games Live Schedule

The Video Games Live tour is rolling again and will be hitting some big venues in the coming months. Their first stop will be Houston on July 14th, then Chicago on August 5th and then Indianapolis on Augst 11th and 12th. Marty will be on hand in Chicago to sign various items and appendages.

You can learn more about the VGL tour at their site. For all of our friends to the north, VGL does plan to make a stop in Toronto on September first. To learn more about upcoming events check out their tour dates page.